ARIJ Digital Clinic — Messenger FAQ & support bot · media

Bilingual Messenger help desk that answers journalists’ digital-security and verification questions and hands complex cases to a Zendesk agent.

Role: Team lead and software architect

Client: ARIJ, investigative-journalism organisation (MENA region)

Team: 2–3 developers

Period: 2022–2023

ARIJ runs the Digital Clinic, a help desk for journalists and media workers across the Arab world. Many requests repeat (a hacked account, securing a laptop, verifying a photo), yet some need a specialist quickly and in confidence. ARIJ wanted a Messenger bot that answers common questions in English and Arabic, lets staff maintain the knowledge base themselves and moves sensitive conversations to a live agent.

The bot detects the language from the Facebook profile and lets the user switch it on the first screen. A nested FAQ tree, managed in an admin panel, appears as image carousels with ‘Next page’ pagination; each answer offers sub-questions, ‘Talk to a manager’ and ‘Main menu’. Handover runs through Zendesk: messages open or update a ticket, agent replies return to Messenger, and ‘Done’ closes the ticket and hands the user back to the bot. It is built on the BotMother core and deployed in Docker.

English and Arabic, language detected from the Facebook profile

Nested FAQ tree edited in the admin, shown as paged carousels

Each answer offers sub-questions, a manager or the main menu

Two-way Zendesk handover: ticket opened, replies relayed, closed on ‘Done’

Persistent bilingual menu and a polite fallback for free text

24 commits over nine months; FAQ and live-agent support for media workers in two languages

PHP (BotMother), Messenger Platform, Facebook Graph API, Zendesk API, MySQL, Docker